Inked In Blood
by karierte
Summary: AU: "You have a girlfriend. You live next door." I squeak. "Yeah, I know." He says dryly, a forkful of tirimasu to his lips. "So why are you molesting my foot?" Mello/Matt
1. 00 light up the fire

**inked in blood**

_karierte _

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00: light up the fire

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It was abysmal weather, Matt noticed; sky off-white eggshell with temperamental clouds and the air of just about to rain. He bent down to observe the loaf of bread and pint of apple juice the milk(&more)man had left on his doorstep—really, if they kept this up, he'd never have to go outside _ever again_ and-_oh_, there was a car parked outside his picket fence. Nice car, he thought absently, gazing into its oil-slick depths, and wondered how much petrol it used up. It was armed to the teeth with optional extras, melded to the tarmac in one sleek curve and reminded him of a shiny gun.

There was a removal van looming behind it, rectangular in shape and fairly ugly in comparison.

"Halle! How much crap did you bring?" A voice calls, and a few seconds later, a body follows it. He doesn't know the time, but guesses it's around one in the afternoon, and he's still in a T-shirt and Pacman boxer shorts. It's most definitely too early for any nocturnal male prostitutes to slither around, _dipped_ in leather and processed through a church. Their eyes meet for a fraction of a second across his front garden, and Matt falls into them with a flicker of his eyelashes, Jesus Christ; because they're blue and bottomless and _shit_-girlfriend. There's a girlfriend. Something leggy and blonde, pretty, swaying down the crazy paving of next door, who takes a cardboard box from the boot of the car, kisses the man on the cheek and sways back.

Matt is suddenly aware that he's staring at his new neighbour, half-naked with a gormless expression on his face, clutching wholemeal bread in one hand like a lifeline.

He goes back inside with a twirl of his slippers and a wordless sigh. He returns ten minutes later for the forgotten apple juice. Wind whips his face and roars in his wet ears, as he lingers over the thick jamjar glass in the hope of another glimpse.

It's a bad start to the day.

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**A/N**

This is short, I know, but it's just a prologue for something that I've been thinking about for some time. My first venture into sustainable multi-chaptered fictions, and I'd love feedback.


	2. 01 let the flame burn

**inked in blood**

_karierte_

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01: let the flame burn

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He's at the door before he can help it; fresh from the shower, towel draped loosely over one shoulder. The lock clicks open and there she is: the girlfriend. He comprehends the outline of her bra black and lacy through her damp white shirt. She smiles at him, and he twitched his lips nervously, and she looks at her painted fingernails before continuing.

"We were wondering if you could give us a hand with the wardrobe." _We_, pronoun 'we', pronoun 'us', she isn't going anywhere soon if they've moved in together.

"Halle, isn't it?" He replies, peering up into her fringed face, she has piercing eyes, sharp eyes, like arrows shooting into his soul. Pointed features; willowy elfin princess meets blonde Lara Croft; red lipstick and it suits her.

"Yes." She answers curtly, and looks at him.

He turns away, "Won't be a minute." He needs to dump the towel and get rid of the evidence, scrub it from his skin before she can see it. Matt is very worried, all of a sudden, about those eyes - soul-seeing eyes that could dissect the something playing hop-skip-jump in his gut. And he's out of the door before he realises it; grabbing his keys and stuffing them in the pocket of his jeans, still in his slippers. Crap. It won't matter if he's moving furniture, anyway.

The wardrobe in question is large and antique, made from several carved mahogany forests. It's damn heavy, he reflects, as he staggers backwards down the removal van's ramp, sexy blond man on the other side, Halle directing them into the house and holding the gate open. One of the unnecessarily ornate corners is repeatedly banging him on the hip; he grits his teeth with every step. He nearly drops the wardrobe when they're ascending the stairs and a few bits of blond hair fall to the side of the man's face-_scar_, there's a scar stalking down to his shoulder and disappearing into his shirt. Matt wants to touch it. He wonders how he missed it earlier.

He ends up helping with the bookcases, plural and then setting up the double bed, singular.

"Thanks…" Halle says, and realises she doesn't know his name.

"Matt." The redhead acquiesces, grinning and making a vague gesture. "And he is…?"

"Mello," Mello interjects in an equally sexy voice: smooth and European-sounding, "it's nice to meet you."

Matt feels faint.

"Let us take you out for dinner; I saw this cute Italian restaurant on our way in. Have you heard of it?" She asks.

"I don't go out much." He admits, and Mello smiles, no, _smirks_.

"Good."

* * *

Halle, Matt finds out amidst the leather car interior, believes in two hour-long baths and a large glass of cranberry juice every day. Mello believes in God and having chocolate in the glove compartment. Halle is American and proud of it; Mello is an only child who likes taller, older women. Matt tells them he likes kiwis and video games (true) and that he works from home (true) for a phone company (false). By the time they find the restaurant, it's just after half past six by Matt's watch, which he put on when he changed into more suitable footwear, which is an acceptable time to eat dinner.

It's a small restaurant with a huge glass window; _Gevanni's_, walls tastefully decorated in mozzarella cream with stripes of sun-dried tomato red and pesto green, and oddly, ships in bottles dangle from the ceiling. Mello parks outside, and Matt scuffs his second-hand Converse on the pavement.

The warmth hits him like a wall, and _shit_-that waiter's _Stephen_? Stephen, shit, it says so on the name badge.

Matt tries to give him a '_what are __you__ doing here?_' kind of look, but it seems like the other man is doing the same thing and Stephen mumbles "Buonasera, signori e signora," with some semblance of a pretend-Italian accent and sweeps them towards a table for three, then promptly runs for the hills. Or rather, the kitchen.

A new waiter locks in on them almost immediately with his mental crosshairs, and manages to convince Halle into the stuffed olive starter and minestrone soup using only the (oddly compelling, Matt reflects) power of his stubble and the copious usage of the word 'bella'. Matt can't decide between the calzone or the 'pasta for the adventurous', and Mello says, very innocently "Tiramisu," even though it wasn't on the menu they were given. Thierry doesn't even bat an eyelash, just scribbles down an abbreviation on the notepad and tells Matt that the calzone is the size of a small continent and that he's better off with the pasta anyway because they have grilled courgettes in the tomato sauce.

They order the house red.

It's burgundy.

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A/N**

REVISED: 1st June, 2010 (*cringe*)

Much love should go to **Nozomi-sama**, who is - _was_ helping me finalise the plot. I abandoned this story to fling poetry willy-nilly at the poor people at deviantART but I'm back now and trying hard to write prose again :'D. And **sakuragawa **- thanks for the review! It would be lovely if anonymous reviews left e-mail addresses so I can reply back n_n! The edits I made to this chapter are fairly minor, so it's nothing to worry about.

Feedback is loved~


	3. 02 open the door

**inked in blood**

_karierte_

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02: open the door

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Matt would like to stop the story here.

There's a handy quote about this issue and he remembers watching 'The Sound of Music' when he was six and didn't like stripes nearly as much. Julie Andrews sings it to the Von Trapp children: _let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start_ and Matt remembers, abc and 123 and do-rey-mi, all very conveniently rhyming.

Very beginnings are difficult to start with; most books say so. The discussion leads to several hypotheses, which Matt can sum up with another neat tricolon: a bus shelter, birth and the end. He follows the strings of his exceedingly limited family tree to the roots and finds nothing but Darwinism and the Big Bang in place of a proper explanation and gives up on that vein of thought with a sigh. Thursday's child has far to go, his mother said, once—looking out of the window with eyes that looked like they'd been washed too many times. And his little seven-year-old self stared into her tired cardigan and replied that as long as the far-to-go wasn't _outside_, he was fine with that. Once is once.

Once is once, and who'd said that to him? Who'd fucking _said_ that to him, when his faded, faceless mother gazed at him with those watercoloured pariah eyes and left him with a shell?

And, Matt knows; the very beginning starts tomorrow.

It always will.

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It began tomorrow, with hair that said stop and eyes that said go go _go_ (oh no). He sang a half-remembered Beatles song with a mouth half-full of apple juice, left hand holding the bottle. The right hand was flicking the cursor around a Solitaire game and a pained voice was drifting from the phone on speaker, lying on the coffee table.

"Could you just _stop_ that?" It said because it had no _taste_.

The redhead idly scratched his nose in response. The knave of hearts cascaded across the screen and he mumbled, "Whatever." The knave of hearts stole the tarts.

"Yes, and to answer my question _what the hell were you doing last night?_"

"Eating," Matt counters simply, pressing F2. "What were you doing?"

"That's my father's restaurant."

"Did you tell him you're a spy moonlighting as a waiter?"

"No…and did you tell yours that you're a criminal hacker moonlighting as an unemployed slob?"

"I would, but he's in an alley somewhere off his head on crack and it would bring _such shame_ to the family."

The swift rebuttal catches Stephen off-guard. He doesn't know much about Matt aside from the names of his laptops, so there's a pause before a, "Touché."

Stephen is a former mummy's boy who likes to appear mysterious and cool—and he usually (or annoyingly, take your pick—Matt doesn't mind) succeeds with both. If he weren't gay, Matt imagines he'd have something akin to an Oedipus complex and the thought of this makes never fails to make him laugh.

So what if he was often bored and Stephen was often there and it often ended in hot, sweaty floorsex and some very thorough carpet burn? He vacuums afterwards, as Matt lies comatose on the sofa, which is quite sweet but all in all; it wasn't exactly a _relationship_. They were both pawns in the same game: that was it. Just pawns who wanted to get to the other side of the board and become something more. Pawns with a good sense of sexual camaraderie.

The ace of spades bounced to the bottom.

"And there was me thinking you were Italian."

"I'm _multicultural_," Stephen insists. Matt can see him, now, swearing in some guttural Romantic language and looking bright as a supernova in his dreary living room, holding him close to the stars behind his eyes. The dark-haired man whispered a proverb to him, once, when he was tired of breaking through peoples' firewalls and being manipulated and he keeps it in his fist, grateful. _When the game is over, the king and the pawn are put in the same box_. Once is once.

It's a goddamned shame, whatever it is.

"If you say so." There's a(nother) silence as they both smile.

The doorbell rings for the second time in two days. If Matt can keep this up, he might even be deemed sociable by the end of next week. An exciting prospect.

"Bye," says Stephen astutely. "I'll see you tomorrow."

"Yeah." The phone clicks as he hangs up. The redhead hums the rest of the song to himself: you say goodbye—I say hello, hello _hello_ (oh no).

Matt opened the door apprehensively. Winchester isn't really renowned for its abundance of mass murderers, but he knows it never hurts to be careful. And Matt is. _Painfully _so.

Then the blond not-mass murderer drawls, "Why, hell-oh,"

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Back at yesterday, things pre-empt themselves. In English Literature, this is called foreshadowing and his secondary school teacher (who had wispy hair and wore long skirts purchased from charity shops) drew a crude diagram of a tree on the whiteboard. He recollects the straight shadow stretched out to the right. Matt can see the tendrils of one now, leading him to the wrong, the stark silhouette of the midnight mass murderer crushing his heart.

After three glasses of wine, something brushes against his leg. At first, he thinks the brush of denim and dead cow is an accident, but he nearly chokes on the _al dente _fusilli as Mello continues to gently stroke Matt's calf with his foot and calmly eat his dessert, fork by fork, continuing his conversation about politics above the table.

Half-way through the fourth, Halle departs on her pilgrimage to the toilet, and Matt lets his leg tingle a little while longer before he confronts his leg-molester. He purses his lips to speak, but Mello gets there first.

"I'm doing it on purpose." It doesn't sound like a confession. _He knows_, Matt blinks mutely, once twice thrice fumbling for the words in his throat; words like _no_ and _but_. This doesn't seem fair.

Mello is _cruel_.

(Matt likes it).

"Y-you have a girlfriend." He stammers in a token effort of morality.

Mello's lips curl in a mockery of a laugh.

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**A/N**

You're shocked. With _reason_.


	4. 03 let jesus return

**inked in blood**

_karierte

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03: let jesus return

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_Bang! _in Mello's face, the door goes. That is, until he realises that his new neighbour is standing outside in the light November morning drizzle, holding his milk hostage–smug with the knowledge that Matt will have to eventually open the door to retrieve it. Bastard.

The rain, in perverse anti-pathetic fallacy, slows to feeble drips.

He might as well leave him out there a little longer.

The apple juice is tipped resolutely down his throat, the bottle clinking against his teeth. Matt sets it into the scratched stainless steel sink and he can feel the bruise on his hip from the day before; aching dark as his room with the curtains closed. The purple pain is as beautiful as a Van Gogh painting and just as meaningless to him.

"I thought you'd never come." The blond swoons sarcastically, suspending semi-skimmed milk out to him with a smile that shows most of his teeth. It isn't a nice smile. It makes Mello look as if he's going to eat him. Like he's going to eat him _and enjoy it_.

There's gentle pitter-patter all around them, a little anti-climactic.

He bends down to dump the rinsed glass bottle by the flowerpot and—_fingers_; fingertips trickling suddenly down Matt's spine, counting vertebrae through the cotton. "Fuck," Matt mumbles to himself. Straightens and shivers.

He obviously doesn't want this. Obviously.

Slammed against a wall letting lips ghost across his own, no, not at all. Mello must be awfully good at his job.

Matt, open-mouthed with a door bell pressed excruciatingly into his back, has never been this aroused in his life. The blond should put that on his CV. Do…do gigolos have CVs? –God, he doesn't even care…sweating under his skin as Mello forest fires down his neck. Burning and burning, like looking at the Sun through your eyelids and the soundtrack to their passion is a tinny _ding-dong_, repeating loudly and annoyingly over his heavy breathing.

He flicks a damp lock of yellow hair out of his face and the redhead's eyes are dilated and verdantine green with jealousy. He sags, boneless against the brick.

Then Mello says, "Here's what's going to happen."

He steps inside, wipes his expensive-looking shoes on the welcome mat.

_Bang! _in Matt's face, the door goes.

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**A/N**

_when you see yourself in a crowded room, __do your fingers itch, are you pistol-whipped?_

fff, sorry for being short and full of alliteration (I cannot stop, really I can't). B-but it was worth it, yes? And reviews, pretty please with cherries on top, everyone on the alert list have revealed themselves to be very awesome~


	5. 04 take seeds from his spirit

**inked in blood**

_karierte_

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04: take seeds of his spirit

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Stephen steps in. He knows that he's not the hero of this story – goes without a doubt who this is about, who it's always been about – but he just…just wants people to see.

This isn't the time to be playing Sherlock Holmes, Stephen thinks. But he can't shake the nauseous feeling in the peach-pit of his stomach.

He's like a communion wafer, for Matt. As if Matt's only practising for the real thing, waiting the wine to become blood and Stephen's transcending transubstantiation to be complete. Until then, Stephen just sponge-soaks him up, every bit he can, until he knows which cupboard the glasses are kept in and can forge the redhead's spidery handwriting better than Matt could ever do himself.

Stephen could be that someone else that he's been waiting for.

Stephen – well, he…he just…just wants. Just _wants_.

And when Stephen looks at Matt, sleeping on the sofa after sex or slumped over his laptops, he feels sick with love for him. Matt could ask him to do anything (_anything_) and Stephen would lie or steal or kill in the spell of a skipped heartbeat and give everything to him. It disturbs him. It scares him so much, what he'd do for Matt.

If he'd ask.

And God, Stephen loves him.

But now he's waiting for Matt to feel the same.

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**A/N**

ok. IT'S LATE. It's short, I've had it since July last year and all I've done is tidied it up a bit. Some kind of special thanks to **Histeria **for reminding me that this even existed by alerting. Stuff has happened about my poetry and important exams and things are happening and I'm rambling and I'll stop. Thank you to all of the people alerting this. And hey, who knows? More will eventually come.**  
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